User:Vecrumba/Pyotr Tkachyov

Pyotr Tkachyov (also Peter Nikitich Tkachev) formulated many of the revolutionary principles to later influence and to be adopted by Vladimir Lenin. Although [] has called Tkachyov "the First Bolshevist", Tkachyov did not figure prominently in the Soviet mythology as to do so would have detracted from the claim to originality of Lenin's revolutionary thought.

Update
I created an article on this overlooked revolutionary: Petr Tkachev. I also created redirects for the various transliterations on Tkachev's name. Historymike (talk) 16:10, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Tkachyov...

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In his book, Russia Under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (p. 169), Professor Malia, citing in a footnote (p. 467) my book on P.N. Tkachev, gave passing reference to the People's Will movement of the 1870s. Malia likewise cited this movement in his NYR review as being an important influence on Lenin's thinking in his youth.

This is putting it mildly. According to his chief librarian in Geneva, V.D. Bonch-Bruyevich (to cite one authority), Lenin consumed all the works of Petr Nikitich Tkachev (1844–1886). He found in them, "B.B." disclosed," Lenin's own essential point of view. As Lenin advised newly arrived Russian exiles to Switzerland, "Begin by reading and familiarizing yourself with Tkachev's Nabat ['Tocsin']: It is basic and will give you tremendous knowledge." Lenin's deep reading of some six volumes of Tkachev's works, whom one Russian publicist of the early 1920s described bravely as the "first Bolshevik," probably, in fact, inspired Lenin to pen What Is to Be Done? This was a work that might just as well have been written by the brilliant "Russian Jacobin," Tkachev. In fact, one of Tkachev's own proto-Bolshevik writings bears almost the same title ("What Is to Be Done Now?" published in Nabat, Nos. 3–5, 1879) as Lenin's pamphlet, as does, of course, Chernyshevsky's novel. For his dictatorship of the workers and peasants, Tkachev had even invented a Committee of Public Safety, anticipating Lenin's Cheka, Stalin's GPU, and the later KGB, which bore the initials KOB (Komissiya Obshchestvennoi bezopasnosti).

After Lenin's death in 1924, the Leader's obvious indebtedness to Tkachev confronted Soviet publicists with a ticklish problem as they set about fashioning the Stalinesque Lenin Cult. For one thing, it would not do for Lenin to be adumbrated by Tkachev, even though Russian historians (before 1924, that is) freely acknowledged the special Russian alloy of Tkachevism-Leninism. For another, Lenin's Bolshevism was described (naturally) as a far superior revolutionary creed to any that preceded it. Lenin, after all, was an incomparable "genius."

As a result, Tkachev's writings were committed to the Orwellian Memory Hole. Or, as in the Brezhnev period, they were so emendated in a cretinized two-volume edition of Tkachev's works (in whose introduction the Soviet editors also criticized me and my book on Tkachev—the first in English about him) as to be unrecognizable —either as essential Tkachevism or as examples of proto-Bolshevism foreshadowing Lenin's ideology.

Albert L. Weeks Sarasota, Florida

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Martin Malia replies: ... Albert Weeks emphasizes a more telling point in the Lenin debate, namely, his debt to the 1870s "Jacobin" Peter Tkachev. This maverick populist advocated a preventive revolution in Russia that would permit her to bypass capitalism and proceed directly to a socialism founded on the peasant commune. Since the peasants could not make such a revolution themselves, it would have to be engineered by a conspiracy of intellectuals governing thereafter as an enlightened dictatorship. In short, Tkachev to a degree anticipated the Bolshevik vanguard Party, and Lenin assiduously read his works in preparing What Is to Be Done? While all this is true, it is going too far to call Tkachev the "first Bolshevik," as Weeks does in the title of his quite useful book. The idea of elite revolutionary conspiracy is hardly difficult to come by: it goes back to Auguste Blanqui in the 1840s and indeed to the ultra-Jacobin Gracchus Babeuf in 1796. More important still, Tkachev's socialism remained peasant-agrarian not proletarian-industrial, a position he defended in a sharp polemic with Engels. And thirty years later Lenin's emerging Bolshevism most decidedly incorporated whatever it owed to Tkachev's politics into the Marx-Engels cult of progress through industrialization. Thus, I did not argue for "the limited degree of Lenin's dependence on...Marx." On the contrary, I emphasized the clear preponderance of Marxism in his mixed worldview.

On the Karl Marx monument still standing across the street from the Bolshoi Theater, there is inscribed a quote from Lenin that would be touching in its naiveté if it had not been so lethal in its consequences: "Marx's teaching is all-powerful because it is true." Lenin never said anything similar about Tkachev, or even about his idol Chernyshevsky. And it is this Marxist pseudo-rationalism that made the "October Revolution" truly revolutionary. For the real Bolshevik revolution was not the comic-opera "armed insurrection" of that month but the ensuing application of Marx's "all-powerful" science to the building of industrial socialism on the ruins of peasant Russia.

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